How long must we wait (ie. must we fight) for citizen-funded elections? As long as it takes says Lawrence Lessig of The Nation (and so do we).

To a borrow a forty-year-old metaphor from John Dean, there is a cancer growing in our democracy and it has metastasized into the lifeblood of every policy proposal that might be construed as having even a short-term negative impact on corporate or significant private wealth. It is not because we have immoral or corrupt politicians or because the modern robber-barons sit atop their fortunes ready to crush the simplest form of citizen empowerment. It is a fault of a system which has never matched the cleverness large sums of money can produce. And, perhaps, it never shall. What can and must be done is a grassroots movement to end the choke-hold campaign contributions and corporate influence has on our government.  We must meet this cancer with a blast of grassroots chemotherapy and repeat whenever necessary. And we must do it with all speed, courage and conviction as though the very life of our democracy hung in the balance. Because it does.

Take the time to read Lessig's piece.

How to Get Our Democracy Back:

If You Want Change, You Have to Change Congress

By Lawrence Lessig 

"The point is simple, if extraordinarily difficult for those of us proud of our traditions to accept: this democracy no longer works. Its central player has been captured. Corrupted. Controlled by an economy of influence disconnected from the democracy. Congress has developed a dependency foreign to the framers' design. Corporate campaign spending, now liberated by the Supreme Court, will only make that dependency worse. "A dependence" not, as the Federalist Papers celebrated it, "on the People" but a dependency upon interests that have conspired to produce a world in which policy gets sold."